skadisprawl replied to your post “I’ve been moonlighting for the last couple of weeks in a freelance...”
Any chance you'd be willing to share the company/site you're working through? I've seen some of those transcription things around, but they all seem to be pretty low pay.
Oh, it’s very low pay. They pay by the minute transcribed, not by the hour spent transcribing, and transcription can take anywhere from 2-10 minutes realtime per minute transcribed. The rates vary from 45 cents to 90 cents per minute, based on difficulty. So on a 10 minute file you might work for an hour and make $4.50. It’s not baseline good money.
I do okay at it because I’m somewhat fast, uncannily good, and I game the fuck out of the system -- I have filters set so that I only ever see files that will be both lucrative and easy, and aren’t in high demand. I also can afford to wait for what I want (which is good because those files aren’t that common) and full-timers can’t do that. Even gaming like hell, I usually make between $8 and $10 per hour worked, sometimes less, and the work isn’t steady, so you can’t bank on it. This cycle, I’ve done 80 minutes and my earnings are sitting around $40 for about 5 hours of work. If you’re a fast typist with good ears you can do okay but it’s not what most people doing it would call a living wage.Â
But the advantage is that you pick exactly when and where you work and what you want to work on. You don’t have to be anywhere at any specific time and if you don’t want to transcribe a file, you just go back to the queue and find another one you like better (once you claim a file you have an hour to abandon it with no penalty, after that your metrics suffer). This is very low-stress and EVEN SO my anxiety sometimes kicks me out because you get graded on the files sporadically and I get anxious about making a good grade (fall below a certain metric and you can’t work).Â
All that said if you want the hookup, hit me up in asks and I’m happy to send you the url. I don’t get a recruiting bonus or anything, so my motives are pure. I think as part time work it’s certainly not the worst you can pull, so there’s no harm in trying, and there’s no upfront investment, you don’t pay fees or anything. But it is wise to keep an eye on how long a file takes you so that if you’re earning serious peanuts you can back away.Â
